Steve McCurry
The Haunted Eye
In 1939, in a letter from Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) to his colleague, the philosopher Max Horkheimer, he wrote about a book that had literally bowled him over. The book in question was "Le Regard" by Georges Salles (1889-1966), art historian and curator at the Musée du Louvre. This essay deals with the relationship between art lovers and objects, the way they look at things, and the correspondence that is established between a subject and an object, and the interferences that come into play. The letter begins:
I'm writing to you, still captivated by the book you made me take away. After I left you the other day, I went into a café and took out "Le Regard". I have to tell you that I was hooked from the very first page. [...] Georges Salles traces, in a powerful and bold sketch, what could be called "the history of human perception". Every eye is haunted, our own as well as that of primitive peoples. Every moment, it shapes the world according to the pattern of its cosmos.
This haunted eye, of which Benjamin speaks in his letter, is the sorcerer's eye through which the reverse side of the world rises, returning to the visible that which was lost or had sunk into obscurity, on the verge of extinction. Splinters of another time that belong to these "primitive peoples", to the civilization of mankind, which together weave a kind of constellation, a "cosmos", making us witnesses of what we have never seen.
Steve McCurry is without doubt one of the most fascinating contemporary photographers. For almost 50 years, he has tirelessly travelled the world, or rather the worlds that inhabit it, letting his wizard's eye slip into the depths of the lives he encounters. Lives at the ends of the earth that are not accessible from our shores, because you have to be like these lives to be able to see them. From the ruins of Angkor to the conflicts of the Middle East, to the Holi rituals of India, Steve McCurry is on a quest for stories to tell, and to do so, he takes his time. The time to wait, the time to listen, the time to let the inner voice of those he meets resurface and retranscribe part of the great universal fresco of the human condition. "The human condition is an enigma that must be fathomed", said André Malraux, whatever the cost. In the darkness of the world's massacres, in the swamps of horror, Steve McCurry's "haunted eye" stuns what it sees. These images are shards of beauty that rise up from the night and inhabit our memories.
This exhibition by Steve McCurry brings together nearly 160 photographs, many of them unpublished. If the career of this great photographer has been built on iconic images, immutable monoliths of sorts, this exhibition proposes to explore other territories, to plumb other depths in this immeasurable archive, and to resize this work by reinterpreting the reading of these images with another way of encountering and telling the world. If Humanity, as Walter Benjamin said, has become so alienated from itself as to experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure (1), then perhaps it's time to take a better look at it and get to know it.
(1) Walter Benjamin, Essays, 1922-1934
